I had heard that Matevossian's Hangover was a work best “left alone”. That it was uncharacteristic of Hrant Matevossian. That in this novella the chronicler of the high mountain shepherds' village of Tsmakut had wandered into corners entirely obscure to him: the corridors of the capital's House of Cinema and its postgraduate dormitory, where slender young women in suede, intoxicating themselves with cigarette smoke, argue about existentialism, Dadaism, verism and other prestigious phenomena of “our century”. That, finding himself in this sophisticated society, Matevossian had flown into a rage and, with a shepherd's bluntness, “lashed out” not merely at the girls with their cigarettes but almost at Antonioni himself. So my choice was not an easy one: either join the author in throwing The Night, Wild Strawberries, Summa Technologiae and the other achievements of “our century” overboard from the ship of modernity (and in that case you know whom one might find oneself siding with...), or throw Matevossian's own novella overboard (which I could not bring myself to do; and again, as you understand, one would inevitably find oneself “siding” with somebody).
Well, I shall say this: no work is more characteristic of Matevossian than Hangover. No novella reveals the inner drama of his prose more vividly. And no text is more tempting to reflect upon. Though I admit that reading it tormented me with such conflicting feelings that I really was afraid to “touch” this novella — not for fear of “siding” with somebody; I could somehow have survived that — but because, for all one's disagreement, what one approaches is no “miscalculation”, no “unsuccessful device”, but the very enchanting prose of Matevossian that one loves and without which neither Armenian literature nor our literature throughout the Soviet Union can any longer be imagined.
In short, let the reader take the relevant issues of Literary Armenia from the shelf and judge. I shall try to explain myself.
So the novella is wholly Matevossian's. In its system of values. In its style. In its rhythm. The running, gliding sentence, unexpectedly shifting its meaning. Pathos glinting almost imperceptibly above irony. And that distant mountain Tsmakut, drowned in the barking of dogs. And a boy alone with a wolf on a mountain road, and the despair of fear: “What do you want from me, you carrion?!” And in this running procession of memories — the powerful, distinctively Matevossian sense of the living, universal, natural bond between things, phenomena and souls: he hands a lady her fur coat in the foyer of the House of Cinema — such a soft little coat — and senses the smell of a lamb — and hears the cry of a sheep — and sees the shepherd's black hands. This chain of associations does not lead Matevossian into global distances, as it usually does with “modern” writers; on the contrary, everything brings him back, everything brings him back — to that boy on the road, to that teacher-training student with a fourteen-rouble scholarship in his pocket — to that salty bread, that salty bread... And through this return the leitmotifs of Matevossian's shimmering speech are like a magnet moved beneath a sheet of paper, and the specks of iron know where they come from... Well, are you going to see Antonioni today?
Ah, yes, “that Antonioni”.
After all, our hero from Tsmakut is attending some screenwriting course in the capital.
Yawning and joking, he enters the auditorium for a private screening. Still yawning, he watches Antonioni's The Night — the aimless wandering of disconnected individuals across an empty, well-tended, dreary earth where even the trees stand separately rather than as a forest. And after watching this creation crowned with laurels at Cannes, he thinks... No, what he thinks can wait; for now, what he says.
When the screening is over and the students go off to discuss the film, this fellow stands up before the ranks of “milky-white postgraduate girls” and says:
— There is just one thing I would like to know: does Michelangelo Antonioni have a mother-in-law?
This is a way of avoiding existentialism, chosisme, verism and all the other murk, and getting straight to the root.
Here, dear reader, you will probably think: what a character this Gevork Mnatsakanyan is! He managed to see Antonioni's The Night and even makes fun of it... If only we had his troubles! Very well, dear reader, let us suppose you have not seen The Night. But if you have seen, say, The Cry or Red Desert, you understand in any case that Antonioni, whether or not we agree with his art, thank God does not need my defence. In this instance it is not Antonioni who concerns me at all, let alone his mother-in-law. What concerns me is Matevossian's hero and why he needed that mother-in-law in the first place.
Perhaps this was his way of bringing Antonioni back to the ground of reality? Fine, let us step onto his ground. Here is what he thought:
“...They should have had five children [the characters in the film — L. A.]; they should have been miners in quilted jackets, milkers in the mountains under the rain, they should have rafted logs down rivers; cleaners in nurseries — that is what they should have been, so that their breasts would wither, their thighs wear away, and their faces shrivel and become covered in countless wrinkles, so that when it rained they would hide beneath a shelter, light a fire and warm themselves, thawing their frozen little bones...”
A consistent, strong and thoroughly Matevossian programme. But, to use his words, “there is just one thing I would like to know”: would Matevossian care to add a writer to these genuine working people — miner, milker, log-rafter, cleaner? So that, thawing their frozen bones by the fire, they might read aloud some “good story”. About how joyfully sunflowers gaze at the sun, eh?
I wager that Matevossian will not put a “writer” into this philippic of his. Because the “writer” would spoil his entire game here. And the game is to tell Antonioni: instead of making these films, you would do better to work with your hands.
But then allow me to ask the hero of Hangover: why is he himself inconsistent? He proudly declares to all those chatterers rushing off to see “that Antonioni” and “that Bergman” that his mother-in-law concerns him more than all the achievements of a chattering civilisation. What concerns him when he is alone with himself?
“The story seems to be coming along. It will be a good story... In the corridor typewriters clattered from several directions at once. You could hear the poets moving to a new line — tak!.. Stringing together a line... a second... a third — tak! A thousand lines — ta-a-ak!”
So much for your miner and milker. So much for the nursery cleaner. He envied the poets.
They were turning out more lines...
The inner drama of Gevork Mnatsakanyan, who has come to the capital from his Tsmakut, is that, while mocking “civilisation”, he understands perfectly well how much he needs it; while despising “words, words, words”, he himself cannot do without them.
“— Dear Mnatsakanyan, you need not go to Cannes. Go to the mountains, become a shepherd again.
My chin began to tremble. I hated this man, hated his logic...”
Now that is honest.
“— Which is better, Eva: existentialism or a child? Existentialism does not cry.
— Then why did you leave your children and come here for that very existentialism? Eh?
Sitting down directly opposite her, I said:
— I am a man...”
That is honest too.
In short, when their questions backed poor Mnatsakanyan against the wall, the “chatterers” left him only one thing to do — he crowed like a rooster.
That, it seems, is the final argument.
Let us too take stock.
What is the lesson of Hangover?
It is that an artist deeply and organically devoted to the land that raised him cannot painlessly “change the record”. Of course, there are writers naturally inclined towards “global universality”, even living by it; such excursions do them no harm. But for Matevossian all this comes at a high price. The capital's intellectual “bon ton” is alien to him, and he unwillingly joins either its enthusiastic or its denunciatory consumers. What matters here is no longer which half of the chorus he echoes. What matters is that he echoes it.
In Tsmakut, however, he is inimitable.
Yes, Matevossian has never written patriarchal pastorals. From his very first stories, his work has always contained a sharp, nervous mobility of spirit opposed to patriarchy, and a curiosity about the new that is more characteristic of a student painfully reflecting on his grandfathers than of grandfathers serenely tending their cattle. Truly, we have before us a soul resembling not a forest but a bush torn away from the forest: “It calls the forest to follow it... but the forest does not move.” Matevossian's hero is ashamed of this separation. But he can do nothing about it. Hence the self-irony: “To be a mower and dream of billiards.” Or — I would add after reading Hangover — to be in the billiard room of the House of Cinema and dream of mowing...
This strange, dual, dramatic state of mind constitutes for me the chief value and chief interest of Hrant Matevossian's work. Precisely because of this “dual representation”, he is neither an Arcadian singer of pastoral delights nor a chronicler of a shepherd's daily life, but a distinctive myth-maker trying to resolve universal moral and spiritual problems on the plateaus of Tsmakut. In Tsmakut he learns genuine spiritual steadfastness. But in the capital... Here we see the reverse of the medal: in the capital he loses the very sense of reality that he learns in Tsmakut. He has little feeling for the real drama of distant characters unlike himself. Here Antonioni's art can become almost equivalent to billiards for him: both are rather far from salty bread and from Dsegh, drowned in the barking of dogs.
So are you for it or against it?
I am for it. I am for literature that reveals our spiritual problems. I am for this novella because, like everything Hrant Matevossian has written, it is the work of an interesting artist; but its lesson is negative for me — unlike the other novellas of the same Matevossian, unlike, say, A Vein of Earth. For A Vein of Earth is a lesson in wisdom, a lesson in love even in misfortune itself, a lesson in courage taught to us by Matevossian's characters. Hangover, however, is a fencing thrust towards an “opponent” with whom, I think, a writer such as Hrant Matevossian ought to have little concern.
L. ANNINSKY